the Wild West

Those of you who haven’t spent a good deal of time poring over the biographical details of Steve Cohen, as though you were preparing to write a dissertation on The Big Guy, may not be aware that he was not in fact born on the Stamford trading floor, wearing glasses and a zip-up fleece. In fact, there was life before SAC Capital and actually a time when Cohen did not work at a place where the office bore his initials in the lobby in 12-foot font. Cohen grew up on Long Island, the son of a dressmaker and after college got his start at a company called Gruntal & Co, which a former employee who worked there at the same time as SC describes in tremendous detail today.

The more frequently you monitor your portfolio, the more likely you are to observe a loss. This is likely to cause short-sighted decisions and could hurt your investment performance. If you are checking your portfolio more than once per quarter, you’re doing it too much.